Against the Calculus of Skin

I have a new essay in Ananke magazine's 10th anniversary special edition. My essay is titled 'Against the Calculus of Skin'. I was thinking of how much of a woman's existence is defined by her body - how much skin is (in)visible, and how cultural notions of attractive/acceptable intersect with politics in our times. A brief extract from it, here: 

I am tired of skin. I am tired of the way women’s skin seem to swallow up their kidneys, aortas, phalanges. For all the space taken up by skin in public discourse, it is almost as if these other bits of us had nothing to do with us being women.

Skin. The largest and most vulnerable organ in the body. It protects us with no protection of its own. At one time in history, humans began to cover up skin with more layers. Some scientists suggest it was during the first iceage, 180,000 years ago. Clothing brought us protection from cold, but also sun and rain, from insect bites and bruising gravel. Men needed it as much as women did. But ever since people began to read gendered meanings into clothing, it has begun to mess with our sense of justice. We make assumptions about how others, especially women, deserve to be treated based on what part of her skin can be espied – how low a saree hangs on her hips, how high the skirt, whether or not her ears and neck are covered – at what time of day. And while I am tired of men who look at a woman’s knees and jump to the conclusion that she desires sexual congress, I am thoroughly sick of women who look at another woman in a bikini and call her a prostitute.

Those who say such things surely know in their hearts that they’re wrong. They say those things anyway because, if a woman is neither within grasp nor concerned about how she’s viewed, they feel compelled to punish her. Some punish with rape, others by perpetuating a moral binary whereby women are split into whore/saint. And I am very, very tired of women rationing out their allyship based on skin so that some of us are cast to the wolves of harassment and bigotry.

Reader, I say, ‘we’, although I want to exclude myself from this reckoning. Still, I say ‘we’ because so many women fall prey to one form of categorical splitting or the other. If it’s not the whore/saint binary, it’s the oppressed/liberated one. Can white women in France or Denmark possibly believe that a woman who refuses to show her face does not deserve to eat? Do Indian women across the spectrum of religious affiliation (or even atheists) truly think that a woman who keeps her neck and chest covered, cannot achieve financial autonomy? Are you that brown woman who refuses to accept that there might be a kind of freedom in not showing off your legs or your cleavage in a culture that demands it of you? Do you sit around calculating how much of an education, what jobs, how much of a political voice should be allowed to a woman based on what percentage of her skin is visible? Hands and arms, elbow down, okay? Ankles, okay? Shoulders, great? Waist, mandatory reveal?

I am sick of this calculus. The expectation of majoritarian assimilation often masks a wilful blindness towards the human struggle to balance individual circumstance and choice against cultural norms, and nowhere is this blindness more insistently inscribed than upon the skins of women. Yet, the meanings we attach to women’s decisions to clothe themselves in particular ways almost always turn out to be wrong if only we would bother to look closer. An image that brought me up short recently was a representation of St Hild of Whitby in the Durham Cathedral. At first glance, I thought it was it a painting of an Iranian or South Asian woman in a chador. Indeed, but for the saint’s name written on the painting, anyone would have thought so. I found myself wondering how people might be impacted by the painting with or without the name. How does our response change, knowing that it is not a present-day Muslim woman, but a medieval Christian saint who dressed that way? Would the average white woman looking at that painting think of St Hild as oppressed or subservient to any mortal man? 

You can read the whole issue here: https://issuu.com/anankemag/docs/ananke_10th_29_